A 10-Point Agenda for Comprehensive Telecom Reform

Changing committee chairmanships in Congress and a leadership shakeup at the Federal Communications Commission have once again opened a window of opportunity for comprehensive telecommunications policy reform. While new faces are taking over within Congress and at the FCC, however, old issues continue to dominate the telecom policy landscape. This is largely due to the fact that, when Congress last attempted to address these matters five years ago by passing the historic Telecommunications Act of 1996, legislators intentionally avoided providing clear deregulatory objectives for the FCC and instead delegated broad and remarkably ambiguous authority to the agency. That left the most important deregulatory decisions to the FCC, and, not surprisingly, the agency did a very poor job of following through with a serious liberalization agenda. The Telecom Act, with its backward-looking focus on correcting the market problems of a bygone era, has been a failure. Instead of thoroughly clearing out the regulatory deadwood of the past, legislators and regulators have engaged in an effort to rework regulatory paradigms that where outmoded decades ago. In short, it was an analog act for an increasingly digital world. The new leadership in Congress and the FCC should adopt a fresh approach based on deregulation and free markets

Is America Exporting Misguided Telecommunications Policy? The U.S.-Japan Telecom Trade Negotiations and Beyond

Global telecommunications markets have traditionally been closed to foreign trade and investment. Recent World Trade Organization negotiations resulted in a Basic Telecommunications agreement that sought to construct a multilateral framework to reverse that trend and begin opening telecom markets worldwide. Regrettably, this new WTO framework is quite ambiguous and open to pro-regulatory interpretations by member states. In fact, during recent bilateral trade negotiations with Japan, U.S. government officials adopted the position that the new framework allowed them to demand that the Japanese government adopt very specific regulatory provisions regarding telecom network interconnection and pricing policies. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative argued that Japanese officials should require their domestic telecom providers to share their networks with rivals at a generously discounted price to encourage greater resale competition. Those interconnection and line-sharing rules were borrowed directly from the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996, a piece of legislation that remains the subject of intense debate within the United States. Good evidence now exists that those rules generally retard net-work investment and innovation by encouraging infrastructure sharing over facilities-based investment. Consequently, the USTR has generated resentment on the part of Japan and other trading partners as it has attempted to force them to adopt heavy-handed telecommunications mandates that have very little to do with legitimate free-trade policy. The USTR must discontinue efforts to impose American telecommunications regulations on other countries as part of free-trade negotiations and should instead focus on reforming or eliminating the most serious barriers to foreign direct investment both here and abroad

The Internet of Things and Wearable Technology: Addressing Privacy and Security Concerns without Derailing Innovation

The next great wave of Internet-enabled innovation has arrived, and it is poised to revolutionize the way humans interact with the world around them. This paper highlights some of the opportunities presented by the rise of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) in general and wearable technology in particular and encourages policymakers to allow these technologies to develop in a relatively unabated fashion